The district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suffer. […] Look how precarious the position is (Conrad 1902, p. 143).
Otherwise, he notes, the ivory Kurtz collected is perfectly good. But in the face of months of strange rumors, the Company's refusal to check his activities earlier amounts to moral complicity; as Phil Zimbardo notes in a different context, management "effectively gave [Kurtz] permission to do these things, and [he] knew nobody was ever going to come [up the river]" to take that permission away (Zimbardo 2008).
In this, the system itself becomes the mechanism through which Kurtz becomes corrupt. Conrad hints at the moral rot spreading beneath the Company's apparently well-ordered surface operations throughout Heart of Darkness. The doctor impassively tests his "theories" about those going upriver rather than attempting to dissuade them from the journey; the "brickmaker" never makes bricks; the accountant, most significantly of all, keeps the books in "apple-pie order" while everything else in the station sinks into chaos (Conrad 1902, pp. 76, 93, 85).
They are too dull or foolhardy in spirit to truly commit active evil, but not strong enough to consciously recognize it or speak out against it unless it offends their sense of protocol, "method," or conformity (Gerrig, et al., p. 550-1). Their evil may be banal, but to Conrad and likely to Zimbardo, it is even more pernicious than that of Kurtz. We all know Kurtz as a colonial monster; his complacent colleagues are anonymous, but either way the society of the Company winds down and true progress becomes impossible.
Works Cited
Conrad, J. (1902). Heart of darkness & The secret sharer. New York, NY: Signet Books.
Gerrig, R.J., Zimbardo, P.G., Desmarais, S., & Ivanco, T. (2009). Psychology and life, 19th edition. Toronto, ON: Pearson Education Canada.
Zimbardo, P.G. (2008). Philip Zimbardo shows how people become monsters…or heroes. Retrieved March 23, 2010, from TED Conferences website: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html.
